Tag: Audrey Kawasaki

Thank you to all that came out to support the opening of our November exhibitions. Congratulations to Atsuko Goto, Audrey Kawasaki, Stella Im Hultberg, Fuco Ueda, Jolene Lai, Lauren Brevner and Lonac on beautiful new bodies of work.

All three exhibits are on view through this Saturday, November 24 at Thinkspace Projects. Visit our website to view the available pieces from Elysium, Menagerie, and Summer in Zaberg.

Audrey Kawasaki is a Japanese-American artist currently living and working in Los Angeles. She attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY where she was influenced by Manga and art nouveau. Her work depicts sensuous young women on wood panel, with a strong emphasis on line quality and facial expression.

The themes in Audrey Kawasaki’s work are contradictions within themselves. Her work is both innocent and erotic. Each subject is attractive yet disturbing. Her sharp graphic imagery is combined with the natural grain of the wood panels she paints on, bringing forth unexpected warmth to enigmatic subject matter.

The figures she paints are seductive and contain an air of melancholy. They exist in their own sensually esoteric realm, yet at the same time present a sense of accessibility that draws the observer to them.

FUCO UEDA

The Tokyo-based Ueda creates surreal paintings of enigmatic girls in strangely beautiful incandescent dreamscapes. With larger than life flowers and creatures ranging from moray eels to butterflies, her paintings are like apparitions pulled from the shadowy depths of the subconscious. Her mischievous adventurers are innocent and devious, at times playful and others sinister, suspended somewhere between the waking world and the beyond. An inscrutable universe of lush neon chrysanthemums and florid skins, Ueda’s world is a hallucinatory daydream.

Ueda’s works convey the lonely meditative feeling of dreams, a world set apart from the existence of others and self-sustained by isolated dread and reverie. At times a darkness pervades with recurring symbols like skeletal hands and the fiery orbs, or hitodama, of Japanese folklore, thought to be the souls of the dead. Another recurring symbol that figures prominently in her works is the chrysanthemum, also a symbol of loss, death, and vulnerability. These surreal apparitions reinforce a sense of displacement and transience. Her lithe figures, often charged with a cryptic eroticism, dissolve into the webs of these conjured worlds; like figments crossing over into ghostly recesses.

The tone of Ueda’s works tends to shift towards a lighter and more whimsical extreme as well. Her girls are often surrounded by small birds, butterflies, underwater creatures, beribboned pets, and dazzling flora, in dreamily abstracted landscapes that seem to glow and hum with weird life. The combination of these light and dark extremes is often unexpected, and psychologically evocative. Beautifully illustrated girls drip with honey and bare skinned knees, while snakes, fish, cobwebs, and bright fungi surround and shroud them. Contrasts abound in her choice of palettes as well, with the mixture of deeply pigmented hues, dark blacks, bright neons and iridescent pastel purples and blues.

ATSUKO GOTO

Atsuko Goto creates beautifully melancholic images of delicate figures cloaked and merged with natural elements, everything from flowers and butterflies to insects, birds, and fish. Her muted palette is as ghostly as haze, achieved through the unique application of diluted pigments made from semi-precious lapis lazuli, ink, and gum arabic applied to cotton.

Inspired by Japanese Shinto and the belief that nature is animated by divinity and sacred spirits harbored in every living and inanimate thing, Goto creates imagery that conveys this feeling of profuse life force and intangible mystery, offset by a darker suggestion of mourning and lament. Quietly meditative, her works exude a dreamlike calm and resignation despite their abundance of detail and the density of her compositions. Silence and forlorn composure define this existence of the preternatural.

Fragile in their tempered darkness, the works are subtle and near translucent – like the unknown light and strange optics of an otherworldly plane where everything is unsubstantial. A feeling of entrapment and isolation persists, however, in the quietude. Like hauntings from the subconscious, the paintings feel like faded dreams, surreal distortions bordering on the ominous. Unsettling, the muted beauty of these diaphanous idols loom, uncannily caught in a thin veil between worlds.

JOLENE LAI

Jolene Lai is a Los Angeles-based artist and illustrator born and raised in Singapore. After studying painting at Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts in Singapore, Jolene studied graphic design at UCLA and spent a year working at a movie-poster design house, The Refinery Creative, before returning to focus on fine art.

She works primarily with oil on canvas or mixed media on watercolor paper. With bold use of color, shape and intricate detail, she creates images with a seductive aesthetic and subject matter that weaves in emotions of whimsy, melancholy, irony, and absurdity.

Lai seeks to engage her audience in works that are approachable, newly imagined spaces that the viewer is invited to explore on their own terms.

STELLA IM HULTBERG

Stella Im Hultberg was born in South Korea, raised in Seoul, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and later in California. She studied Industrial Design and worked as a product designer before serendipitously falling into the art world in late 2005. Stella Im Hultberg’s paintings are conceived in varying combinations of ink, watercolor, and oils on paper, wood, and canvas. Her portraits of women are rendered in easy, flowing lines with soft hues that transcend the typical critiques of feminine beauty, inherent in today’s self-conscious society.

Hultberg originally studied Industrial Design at CSU, which naturally segued into work as a toy designer early on in her career. Work in the design industry serendipitously led to her building on her natural talents as an artist and a career as a self-taught painter soon followed. Having grown up in Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan, she has a diverse blend of cultural influences to pull from.

When not painting or drawing, she likes to eat, ride her bicycle, and play the New York Times crossword puzzle. After a decade in NYC, she now lives (and works) in Portland OR with her daughter and husband.

Thinkspace Gallery is taking over the eighth edition of the Moniker Art Fair this coming October with 8 stands including seven mini solo-exhibitions and one group exhibition. We’re honored to be hosting the debut U.K solo shows for some of the biggest names in the New Contemporary/ Urban Contemporary movements. At least 8 new works will be on view from each featured artists in addition to a new print edition for their London fans. Each artist’s print to be released in tandem with the fair.

Audrey Kawasaki will be at Stand 28, and our group exhibition at Stand 34 where we will have our free Thinkspace logo parody buttons (in the vein of the classic logos of Slayer and Motorhead). We are really looking forward to meeting as many of our U.K. based patrons as possible during the fair.

Please note, we will be offering the works for sale first to those attending the VIP and Public openings of the Moniker Art Fair. We are committed to helping to build each artist’s patron base in the U.K. A digital preview for each solo exhibition and our group exhibition will be shared the morning of Friday, October 6th. We will then get back to all interested parties during the day of Saturday, October 7th to discuss purchases. Please do not call the gallery regarding Moniker Art Fair purchases on October 7th.

We can’t wait to debut all these incredible new works in just a few weeks.

Excited to get back over to London for the third time for our biggest event ever! We will be taking over the eighth edition of the MONIKER ART FAIR this coming October with 8 stands including seven mini-solo exhibitions and one group exhibition.

Honored to be hosting the debut U.K. solo shows from some of the biggest names in the New Contemporary / Urban Contemporary movements. At least 8 new works will be on view from each featured artist + a new print edition for their London fans will be issued in tandem with the fair. Be sure to come by our group exhibition at Stand 34 and say hi and grab your free Thinkspace logo parody button (in the vein of the classic logos of Slayer and Motorhead). We are really looking forward to meeting as many of our U.K. based patrons as possible during the fair.

Visit us at stands 27-34 at The Old Truman Brewery at 91 Brick Lane in the Shoreditch area of London, England / E1 6QL

Please Note: we will be offering the works for sale first to those attending the VIP and Public openings of the fair. The whole notion of this endeavor was to build each artist’s patron base in the U.K. Once the fair has opened we will do our best to then follow up with everyone that could not attend and get them a choice work. A digital preview for each solo exhibition and our group exhibition will be shared the morning of Friday, October 6 at 8 AM Pacific. We will then get back to all during the day on Saturday, October 7 to discuss purchase. Thank you and we can’t wait to debut all these incredible new works next month.

SOLO BOOTHS FROM:

Audrey Kawasaki + Brian Viveros + Cinta Vidal + David Cooley

Dulk + Kevin Peterson + Telmo Miel

GROUP SHOW WITH WORKS FROM:

Sainer + Zoer + Sebas Velasco + Esao Andrews + James Bullough

Fintan Magee + Carl Cashman + Jaune + Lonac& more

MURALS IN THE SHOREDITCH AREA FROM:

Dulk + Telmo Miel

BOOK SIGNINGS ON SATURDAY FROM:

Brian Viveros + Dulk + Telmo Miel

PRINT RELEASES ON SATURDAY FROM:

Audrey Kawasaki + Brian Viveros + Cinta Vidal + David Cooley

Dulk + Kevin Peterson + Telmo Miel

Full details including times for the print drops and book signings to follow next week along with sneak peeks from each of the participating artists. Prints will be issued to attendees of the fair first. Online sales of any remaining prints will follow late the week of October 9 and we will share full details here, to all on our newsletter list. Thank you.

This Saturday, January 21st from noon to 6PMwe will be having our first print archive sale in over three years. We will be sharing the final copies of several sold out editions, the framed display copies of several sold editions, final copies of rare editions, some Artist Proofs, and much more. Plus, there will be some gems from our personal collection made available too.

First come, first served. In-person sales only.

There is no online catalog available and no phone orders being taken. There will be gems from the likes of Audrey Kawasaki (shown above), Etam Cru, Esao Andrews, Brian Viveros, Kevin Peterson, Stella Im Hultberg, Amy Sol, and many, many more.

We will also have our recent books from Brian Viveros and Joao Ruas available for sale as well as Jeremy Fish’s recent book. We’ll also have some cool giveaways throughoutthe day plus freebies including new magnets for your fridge and our new ‘Miami Vice’ inspired logo button from our trip down to Miami for SCOPE this past December.